Cinema: Curious Native Customs

After a year's safari into darkest Hollywood, Anthropologist Hortense
Powdermaker has emerged with a published account of her findings,
Hollywood, The Dream Factory (Little, Brown; $3.50). On the basis of
previous research among backward Melanesian natives, Dr. Powdermaker
concluded that the denizens of Hollywood are even more primitive, more
superstitious, more beset by anxieties than Stone Age tribesmen.

She was surprised to discover that the movie people generally lived, not
on palatial estates, but in tidy suburbs resembling Baltimore's Roland
Park and Cleveland's Shaker Heights. They proved excellent interviewees
because "the level of...